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"View Slideshow\n\nShocking-violet hair, floating draperies, a rich anecdotal style and a shrewd and loving eye for beautiful things\u2014these were the elements that made up Rose Cumming, the legendary decorator. Her life was the stuff of romance. She was born on an Australian sheep ranch. In 1917 she and her sister came to New York on their way to England, where Cumming was to be married; but even though the United States had not yet entered World War I, no ships were accepting women for passage across the bellicose waters, so the sisters were stranded. Having great social presence (and a little money), they became popular in New York society. Cumming, finally deciding that she needed a job, asked her friend Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair, what to do. When he suggested she become a decorator, Cumming is said to have replied, &amp;quot;Perhaps I would, but first tell me what it is.&amp;quot;\n\nShe quickly learned what decorating meant. She opened her own shop on Park Avenue, which functioned in the European way: It was her decorating office and a retail shop for antiques and fabrics.\n\nHer greatest strength was as a colorist. &amp;quot;Parrots are blue and green. Why shouldn&amp;#39;t fabrics be?&amp;quot; Cumming asked.\n\nCumming&amp;#39;s signature trait was that she was a showman. From the beginning, she put the best of her furniture and bibelots in the window of the shop, and at night she left the lights on, which nobody had ever done. Her rooms were stage sets, with an unexpected mix of elements and a glittering fairy-tale effect. As a decorator, Cumming would become famous for combining pieces in ways that seemed random, although they were actually highly disciplined. She liked and used\u2014often together\u2014Gothic and early English, Asian (except Indian), Chippendale, Louis XV, Austrian Baroque and painted Venetian furniture. Her  greatest strength, however, was as a colorist. She painted walls aubergine, mixed teal blue with lime green, tangerine orange and blood red and filled a room with her favorite hyacinth taffeta, spiced with purple and pink. &amp;quot;Parrots are blue and green. Why shouldn&amp;#39;t fabrics be?&amp;quot; Cumming asked.\n\nShe was an iconoclast with materials as well as styles and colors. She covered walls with Mylar, draped beds in silver lam\u00E9 and, in the 1930s, hung cellophane curtains at the windows. With her sense of the dramatic, it is not surprising that she counted Marlene Dietrich, Norma Shearer and Mary Pickford among her clients.\n\nCumming designed and printed fabrics in her own bold colors, creating some from scratch and sometimes recoloring chintzes she bought in England. Her sister Eileen Cecil carried on the fabric business after Cumming&amp;#39;s death in 1968, with the help of a designer named Ronald Grimaldi. Recently, the business was sold to Dessin Fournir, the Kansas-based furniture and fabric firm headed by Chuck Comeau. In going through the archives, Comeau discovered old boxes that contained fabrics hand-painted and printed by Cumming in the 1930s in simpler and more abstract forms than her chintzes. Comeau says,  &amp;quot;Opening those boxes, I felt the way somebody would feel if they found King Tut&amp;#39;s tomb. It shows another side of what Rose did, but it all fits in with the way she combined forward thinking and progressiveness with classicism and timelessness.&amp;quot;\n\nNot long before her death, Cumming recalled what she had written years earlier: &amp;quot;Either you have a flair or you haven&amp;#39;t.&amp;quot; Cumming had it."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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